“No,” says Ailes, who helped make the Willie Horton furlough issue front-page news. “I thought you were in a happy mood.”
Rush H. Limbaugh III, America’s most popular-and politically incorrect-radio personality, should be deliriously happy. His new book, “The Way Things Ought to Be” (Pocket Books. $22), is an instant best seller, with 725,000 copies in print. His daily radio show now reaches 12.5 million listeners on 500 stations nationwide. And last Monday Limbaugh completed a media hat trick. “Rush Limbaugh (Talent on Loan From God)” premiered on 189 TV stations across the United States, or 95 percent of the country. Ailes, who helped transform George Bush from milquetoast itto attack dog in 1988, and the show’s distributor, Multimedia Entertainment, couldn’t have timed the debut better: Limbaugh’s us-against-them tirades jibe perfectly with the disaffected Republican right in this polarizing election year. Besides, says Ailes, " Rush has brains, a sense of humor and he’s the best improvisational performer since early Jack Paar."
The TV show follows a simple formula: let Limbaugh be Limbaugh. That means 22 minutes of mostly unrehearsed patter (plus occasional phone chat) stripped of conventional accouterments like guests and a band. Sitting at a mahogany table in his library (adorned with a trash can with the word LIBERALS painted on one side), Limbaugh treats viewers to a stream of conservative oratory, spiced with one-liners and Lettermanesque braggadocio (“My friends, do you know anybody else who would dare risk carrying a show all by himself?”). The routine is familiar to Limbaugh’s radio audience: he’s the American White Male under siege, coping with femi-Nazis, dolphin huggers, “wacko” environmentalists and closet “socialists” such as Bill Clinton. After mentioning that Madonna’s Florida home was wrecked by Hurricane Andrew, he says with a malicious grin, " It’s not the first time some guy has blown into town, trashed her, then left her in the morning."
How does it play on TV? Limbaugh is comfortable in front of the camera, handling the pressures of improvisation with aplomb. Still, many of his gags fall flat, and so far he lacks the zany visual imagination that has kept his late-night rival, Letterman, fresh for a decade. Those failings, along with Limbaugh’s windiness, can give the program a static quality reminiscent of those shot-on-a-shoestring, late-night televangelist shows. Then there’s content: many of Limbaugh’s targets, from Clinton’s evasiveness about the draft to Woody Allen’s love life, invite ridicule. But lurking behind much of the humor is a strident intolerance that’s hardly likely to broaden his appeal in his new medium. TV’s far more intimate than radio, and its survivors are usually soothing figures like Johnny Carson, not “hot” personalities like Morton Downey Jr. and Limbaugh. For his part, Limbaugh insists, somewhat disingenuously, that his objective is to entertain, not offend. “All you have to do is criticize black people and they call you a racist,” he says, referring to his Spike Lee routine. “There’s no difference [between] that and when Arsenio Hall says, ‘George Bush, you can kiss my black ass’.” (Arsenio’s actual line, said after Bush hinted he might hit the gabfest circuit, was, " I don’t remember inviting your ass to my show.")
Early returns suggest that Limbaugh has at least piqued viewers’ curiosity. His first week’s ratings were about equal to those of “Late Night,” averaging a 2.5 Nielsen rating and a 10 share nationwide. (About 2 million households tune in each weeknight.) Limbaugh is strongest in midsize markets on the West Coast and in the Midwest. But he’s doing poorly in New York (where he follows Arsenio Hall) and isn’t even carried in Washington, D.C. Analysts say his staying power is difficult to predict. “The conflict between right-wing radicalism and cooler heads is so polarizing now,” says one top ad executive. “I don’t know whether it will hinder or help the show.” However long it lasts, Limbaugh’s mad-as-hell message now has a seductively jovial face as well as a voice. And that’s what makes it more unsettling than ever.
